Leaning on Israel?

Put simply, he’s in Israel to try to dissuade the Israelis from bombing Iran.

There remains a strong thread of opinion inside the Israeli cabinet that argues that Iran is building a nuclear bomb and needs to be stopped in its tracks. Reportedly, Israel does not have a supply of the American developed deep bunker busting bomb required to penetrate the storage chambers in Natanz where, beneath some 55ft of reinforced concrete, Iran keeps her enriched uranium.

But the US Vice President, Joe Biden is not alone in his mission.

It is rare for so senior a US official to commit himself to six days in the region. He’s there with President Obama’s chief Middle East negotiator George Mitchell. In truth, Mitchell, the abidingly decent, patient and ultimately successful negotiator of the Northern Ireland pace has got effectively nowhere thus far in his attempts to negotiate a breakthrough in the Middle East.

Many who study the region are saying now that the option for what George Bush became the first president to enunciate – a two state solution – has passed.

Despite America’s very public support of the UN call for a cessation of work on new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building work continues apace. The Obama administration has discovered what the world already knew, no one is prepared to do anything about it.

As one former UK envoy to the UN put it to me the other day, “Were Israel any other state, it is hard to imagine that her actions in the occupied territories would by now have secured a UN sanctions regime”.

Despite the reality that the 2009 presidential victory secured by Barack Obama was less dependent upon donations from the pro-Israel lobby than any in recent history – owing to the sheer mass and diversity of the small donations that swelled his electoral war chest – Obama does not appear to observers to be running an administration that is going to get tough with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government any time soon.

The strangling of Gaza, the settlement building programme, and the flouting of years of UN resolutions have never secured anything more than the occasional American finger wag.

So, does Joe Biden’s arrival in the region signal change? Don’t hold your breath – and yet could there be something afoot?

Obama has in his first year made no serious personal investment in the peace process. Is Biden perhaps his ‘John the Baptist’ in this regard? Many will hope so. The conflict remains the greatest single fuel source for Muslim discontent from Indonesia to the East End of London.

Incidentally, it wasn’t until I saw that Mr Biden would not be seeing Egypt’s President Mubarak, that I discovered that the octogenarian leader is in a hospital bed in Germany after a gallbladder op last Saturday.

But then peace in the Middle East has, of late, rarely depended upon Egypt. She operates at least as draconian a border operation against the Palestinians as Israel administers.